BackupBuddy Loopback Error and Password Protection

The infamous BackupBuddy loopback error is the source of much frustration in the WordPress community.  BackupBuddy is a widely used WordPress plug-in makes backing up, restoring and moving WordPress sites pretty simple, but not if you’re banging your head against the wall over the whole loopback thing.  If you’re struggling with BackupBuddy loopback errors, here’s one possible cause.

If you are using .htaccess (or a similar mechanism) to password protect your wp-admin directory, your backup will break. It will break with that awful BackupBuddy loopback error, which really tells you nothing. If you dig, you’ll see that when BackupBuddy attempts to make an http connection to your site it gets whacked with a 403 Forbidden message from Apache (or Nginx if that’s what you’re using). This makes sense because BackupBuddy cannot send the username/password combo that Apache or Nginx is asking for. You’ll have to remove that requirement in order for BackupBuddy to work.

This won’t solve every case of “BackupBuddy loopback error heartache”, but we’ve seen enough less experienced WordPress admins with this particular problem that we thought it worth a quick post.

While we think that protecting wp-admin is a good thing to do, using password protection to get there is not an option for you if you’re married to BackupBuddy.  Our managed WordPress hosting includes some wp-admin protection along with two-factor authentication by default, so feel free to contact us if you need help with that sort of thing.

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Photo Credit: w4nd3rl0st (InspiredinDesMoines) via Compfight cc